Multimedia content comprehends a variety of visual and audio content. Some illustrative but not exhaustive examples include cinema (movies), television shows, radio programs, musical performances, spoken words performances and theatrical productions. It is common for multimedia content to be enjoyed and shared by groups of people. Such groups may include people with widely different levels of maturity, for example a family with adults and children of varying ages.
Parents, teachers, coaches, care-givers and other people may be tasked with the responsibility of choosing multimedia content that is appropriate to the level of maturity, cognitive development and emotional capabilities of members of a group watching, listening to or otherwise engaging with multimedia content. Service providers may provide ratings that are useful in assessing the appropriateness of multimedia content items, wherein viewers may choose content based on having an appropriate content rating. For example, a “General” or “G-rating” signifies content very mild in impact and suitable for everyone; “Parental Guidance (PG)” indicates content still relatively mild in impact but not recommended for viewing or playing by persons under the age of 15 without guidance from parents or guardians; and “Mature (M)” is an advisory category that indicates content that is not mild relative to G and PG rated content and that is recommended only for mature audiences, and thus not recommended for children under 15 years regardless of guidance from parents or guardians.
Parental control systems enable parents to filter out media content having ratings inappropriate to the viewers, such as by entirely preventing the presentation of content items with mature content ratings to children, or by actively filtering out or redacting only those portions of a movie or other content item that are rated or designated as presenting mature content, allowing the remaining portions to be viewed by all ages.